'A reality without edges'

"Jung's basic position on mystical experience was this: it is real. It is not delusion, not pathology, not a wish-fulfillment fantasy projected onto the cosmos. When people describe an encounter with something overwhelmingly larger than themselves — something that feels more real than ordinary reality, that carries the quality of absolute presence, that leaves them permanently changed — Jung said that experience is pointing at something genuine in the structure of the psyche.

Specifically, it is pointing at the Self.

The Latin phrase unio mystica — mystical union — refers to the peak experience of the contemplative life. The moment of direct, unmediated contact between the human soul and the divine ground.

And Jung was clear: this is not always a gentle experience. In fact, the accounts of the great mystics suggest it is rarely gentle. It is more often shattering. The ego does not slip peacefully into union with the divine. It is overwhelmed. Dissolved. Turned inside out by a reality it was never designed to contain.

John of the Cross called it the night of the soul — not the peaceful surrender of a self that is ready to go, but the terrifying stripping away of everything the soul had been relying on for its sense of identity and security. The mystics of the Rhineland tradition — Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroeck — wrote of a nakedness of the soul, a poverty of spirit, a complete emptying that had to precede the fullness of union".

Ref: Mysticism & the Ego's Dissolution, https://substack.com/home/post/p-192853836
Nobody on Substack, https://substack.com/@nobody2025